Tiger Woods no long feeling pain in the neck at Players

March 14th, 2019

Tiger Woods no longer has a pain in the neck.

The trick going forward for Woods is to make sure the soreness that caused him to withdraw from the Arnold Palmer Invitational doesn’t keep him from missing more tournaments the rest of his injury-filled career.

“I’m 43 with four back surgeries so must manage what I have and understand that I’m going to have good weeks and bad weeks and try and manage as best I possibly can and not push it,” Woods said after a nine-hole practice round at The Players Championship.

“There are times when over the years I pushed it, pushed through a few things, and I’ve won a few tournaments doing it that way,” he said. “But also, I’ve cost myself a few years here and there because of it.”

Woods chose not to push it last week by skipping Bay Hill, where he has won eight times.

He had fusion surgery on his lower spine in April 2017 — his fourth surgery on his back in four years — and it allowed him to return to a level that saw him win last year at the Tour Championship, play in another Ryder Cup and return to the top 15 in the world ranking.

Woods said his neck first bothered him last summer at the British Open, where he was seen wearing kinesiology tape, and at times during a big stretch of tournaments during the FedEx Cup playoffs.

It flared up again at the Genesis Open last month, and then got worse in Mexico City the following week.

“It was getting to the point where it was affecting my setup, my backswing, my through swing,” Woods said. “It was just gradually getting worse. That’s just because my lower back is fused, and so the stress has to go somewhere if I don’t have movement, and so it’s very important for me going forward since the surgery to keep pliable or else the stress is going to go somewhere else.”

Woods did not want to commit to a pre-Masters schedule until after The Players was over.

The Valspar Championship next week is where he was runner-up last year. That’s followed by the Dell Technologies Match Play, a World Golf Championship for which he had not been eligible since 2014.